Whenever a non-educator asks me how work is, I never answer honestly. I either respond with a demented “It’s good!!!” or a flat “Fine.” This is partly because I rarely think such open-ended questions are sincere, and partly because I’m not enough of a raconteur to make my work interesting for people who don’t also work with me at my work. But it’s mostly because, at best, speaking candidly about my job as an administrator in a city public school runs the risk of confirming people’s preconceived notions about how sweaty and miserable working in a school can sometimes be, and/or, at worst, their latent prejudices about black kids.
However, when another educator asks me how work is? We’re so unfiltered that if anyone with the even lightest concern for the welfare of children overheard us they would immediately demand that proper authorities revoke our licenses, or at least start homeschooling their own kids.
It’s called venting. Everyone does it. It’s necessary.
Especially this year. Because this year, let’s be honest — it’s been rough! “Rocky start” doesn’t begin to describe. But what’s struck me most about the candid conversations I’ve had with educators about how our “work is” is not so much how proudly inclusive we’ve been with the targets of our profanities, how sundry our gripes— it’s how banal the objects of our complaints have been.
After all, if your primary understanding of what happens in American schools comes mostly through social media or the news, then you might be forgiven for thinking that much of what educators have been struggling with this year have been the following: mask rules, quarantines, vaccinate mandates, traumatized students, school board fights, battles over readings lists, TikTok pranks, what Florida’s doing, what Texas is doing, the fate of gifted and talented programs, school violence, critical race theory, and/or, that old alliterative chestnut, learning loss.
Without diminishing the gravity of those aforementioned issues, I would like to provide a very subjective, very non-scientific list of the actual day-to-day problems educators have been wrestling with this year. A big nota bene: this is based on my own limited experience as an administrator, as well as that of my colleagues who work, teach and lead in other schools and districts whom I’ve had conversations with. It’s not exhaustive or definitive, and it skews toward institution-wide issues as opposed to the classroom-level problems teachers have been dealing with, and it probably applies more to those of us who work with adolescents, but I’d like to this it’s somewhat representative of educator’s daily tribulations. My hope is that this serves as a counter to the media narrative about what school has been like this year, and why it’s (actually) been so — what’s the term — fucking hard.
There’s just more slack in the rope. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the main adjective I’ve seen applied to American students is “traumatized.” Are they? Some, sure. Many? Well, I think two things are at work here around the usage of that term: one, news stories have simply overstated the case and, two, a bit of rhetorical creep has set in where the term has morphed to refer to almost any adverse state of being or negative response to detrimental circumstances, however severe. The term has become diluted. Most students seem genuinely happy to be back in school. A few students arrived in September anxious and scared, but based on how quickly they settled in, it seems much of their trepidation was nothing more than first day jitters. Over all, I don’t think legions of students are traumatized, just simply taking longer to adjust to what educators like to call “doing school,” which are the habits, behaviors and attitudes we teach kids to adopt from kindergarten on that allow them to do the very hard, important, sometimes dull work of learning academic content (and other stuff, too) and ultimately becoming decent, hard-working adults. “Doing school” refers specifically to getting there on time; knowing where your classes are; following rules even when many of seem arbitrary or unfair; paying attention to (let’s face it) somewhat or very boring lessons for many hours each day, day after day; speaking up and speaking clearly; ignoring distractions; being nice; being patient; learning how to organize all of your stuff; remembering due dates; managing your time, etc. No student really had to do that for over a year (you’d be shocked by the variety of academic experiences students had last year based on which school they went to), so they’re out of practice, and even during a normal September, it takes a while to get students back into the swing of things. As a result, this year, it’s taken a lot longer, and a lot more effort from all of the adults in the building to get them to settle into the rhythm of school. I am 100% not saying there aren’t many students out there who weren’t traumatized by the social isolation of the pandemic, and who don’t have serious mental and emotional health needs that we are legally and duty bound to address, and indeed, for those whose home lives were not comfortable or even safe, last year was hell, but I think those cases are far less frequent than we have been led to believe by much of the coverage, and I think many of the student-related issues teachers and administrators have dealt with students have simply been students readjusting, and readjusting hard.
Mark Zuckerberg is an asshole. There’ve been more than a few stories about how many more fights and how much more student misbehavior has occurred year, but the data on this is largely anecdotal since we have no reliable way of counting incidents across districts. The brief, sensational panic over TikTok pranks has also lent legitimacy to the claim. And also with this issue we see another rhetorical sleight of hand: though there have been more incidents involving weapons in schools, there’s an enormous difference between that kind of thing and students acting out, or even getting into petty fights. (I’ve also noticed that a few of those stories have quoted Mo Canady, the executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, as if that proves anything but, honestly, what would we expect him to say?) But, plot twist: I do think there’ve been more student disruptions this year. I mean, see what I wrote above re: readjusting. However, I don’t think it’s for many of the reasons given: increased gun sales nationwide, unstable economy, an uptick in violence in general, pandemic-related isolation, political tribalism. (Schools mirror society, but not in the ways adults sometimes think, and that’s mostly because of how endearingly self-absorbed children are, especially teenagers. My favorite example of this is the morning after a certain surprising election result left most of the staff utterly despondent. Our students caromed from class to class with their usual exuberance and had no idea why any of us were upset.) Again, the cause is more banal. Social media. I cannot stress enough how disruptive social media is to the culture of schools and how erosive to student well-being it has been for well over a decade (to say nothing about Netflix, Hulu, et al.) Ninety percent of problems among students can be traced back to something that was posted on some social media platform. They are the seed of nearly all drama and the root of many self-esteem issues among students, but if you don’t work in a school I don’t think you would know the extent to which that was true and though it was true before the pandemic it’s worse now, and I’ve been disappointed and surprised by how little attention has been paid to this. So, that there may or may not be more fights and classroom misbehavior this year is to me less important than why.
More of the same... What happened to not reverting to the way things were? What happened to acknowledging that schools weren’t serving all students’ needs? What happened to all the ideas we were going to try? What happened to the will to do that? This is perhaps the biggest complaint among educators. Not only does the first semester of 2021-2022 feel about the same as the first semester of 2019-2020, there appear to be few big changes on the horizon. Here is a list of things all of us were hoping might change, or at least start to change: how schools and teachers are evaluated, standardized testing, graduation requirements, how and when and where students go to school (seat time, the length of the school day/year, remote or asynchronous options), what students learn, how schools are funded, teacher schedules, student schedules, parent engagement, community-based organization engagement. No one was expecting the 50 million public school students in this country to suddenly attend beautiful, well-lit schools of highly individualized learning that also happen to serve a huge democracy’s 21st century civic and economic needs and are fully staffed with jolly, well-compensated adults who have ample time to collaborate and have bitchin’ playgrounds and delicious cafeterias and treat all students equitably and are funded fairly and don’t necessarily have to start at 8 and end at 3 and go Monday - Friday from August/September to May/June, but, for chrissakes, can anyone point to any state or large district that has made or is moving to make one meaningful change to the basic DNA of schooling that’s not just a stop-gap to address learning loss or an annex grafted onto the existing system?
…and more with less (or, um, fewer.) We don’t have enough staff. There actually has been a lot more coverage of this recently, but I still think this is worth noting. But contrary to what you’ve heard, there has not been a mass exodus of teachers or support staff from the profession, but there are more teaching and staff positions available (especially in districts that serve high needs populations) and those positions remain unfilled probably for a lot of the same reasons every other industry has been struggling to fill vacancies for months now. Every educator I know has talked about their school desperately needing office staff, paraprofessionals, schools aides, and/or a couple extra teachers. Even short a few people in key areas puts strain on the system, especially when that system runs on a series of unremitting bells that tell children when to start, move and stop, and when all of the important things have to happen at certain moments in between the ringing of those unforgiving bells, or they don’t happen at all. On top of that, because students and teachers need so much more support and attention this year, current teachers, staff and administrators are exhausted to their limit.
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Just some thoughts. If you work in a school, I’d love to hear yours. What am I missing? What did I get wrong? What would you add? Comments are open below. And if you know someone who works in a school, forward this to them. I’d love to hear their thoughts, too.
Above image: Watusi (Hard Edge) by Alma Thomas. Smithsonian.
What Schools Have Actually Been Dealing With This Year
Good one. I actually think it's incredibly important that parents stop and think for a second about the million micro interruptions and demands they put on schools and school staff for stuff that just doesn't have to happen. Book fairs, STEM nights, movie nights, fundraisers that net less than 5% after expenses, letting the super anxious run the show and demand the school triple check vaccination status. Parents are the number one reason we have had such scope creep.